Tuesday

It all started when I was bragging to Terry Rommel, a friend from work, about the Video Game Cabinet I wanted to build. He said "Instead of building your own, why don't you use the arcade cabinet that my Grandfather has in his Garage? I think it's a Galaga Machine."It sounded like a good idea. If it was in good shape, it would have a marquee, side art, and a coin door. These are all things I wanted for my project. I told him I would give him $50.00 sight unseen for the cabinet.

We agreed to meet after work and drive the 40 miles to his Grandfathers farm in Hanover PA. As we pulled up in the driveway, I got the first look at his "Garage". As you can see from the picture, the outside of the garage was surrounded by old gas pumps, piles of metal, and almost anything you could imagine."Uh-oh" was all that I thought as I climbed out of my van. I approached the garage and met a nice old man who's biggest joy in life was going to auction.

He looked mostly for metal items he could sell for scrap.He told me a story about how 15 years ago he was at an auction, and this "Pinball" machine was for sale. There was no keys to the thing and the doors were locked. The auctioneer convinced him that it was probably full of quarters. So he bought it and dragged it home on the back of his old pickup truck. After carefully cutting the lock on the back of the cabinet, he looked inside and found... NOTHING BUT THE KEY.

Being disappointed, he put the "pinball" cabinet in the back of his garage and left it.Finally he decided to invite me into his garage to see his "pinball" cabinet for the first time. We wound around the drill press and lathe, past the mountain of chain to the back corner of a dirty, greasy garage. There were broken windows all around. He kept the Lightning Fighter 2 Hack garage door open year around so the cats and dogs could get out of the rain. Not exactly a protective environment for a Video Game cabinet. There in the corner, covered with a heavy layer of Guano, (Bird Doo Doo for you unsophisticated types), was a GALAXIAN machine.

It was greasy and grimy, and for fifty dollars, it was all mine!You can almost see the white layer covering the screen.I used my refrigerator cart and hauled it back to my van. I thanked him, and stood for another 20 minutes while he told me the rest of his life's story. He told me I would make a lot of money with his old "Pinball". He just couldn't understand how I was going to make any money by keeping it at my house.To be continued.. My GREEN T-Molding has arrived! I will now be able to replace the black non-original T-molding! I own a Galaxian Video Game. I will tell you about the restoration project here. Here are some thumbnails. I'll explain them later.

The story of the home computer is not unlike other electronic hype stories. Teletext and Videotext, "information services" which rely on over-the-air delivery, have been terrific failures thus far. The reason is simple. The purveyors sold them as some kind of revolution. The services weren't just televsion and entertainment, they said. They were more. It would replace the newspaper. All we had to do was tune-in channels and check vast data bases to get information. But we're information rich and knowledge poor.

We're told we have to have heaps of facts while we disregard the small truths. The reality of the small truth is that most of us still like leafing through newsprint with our morning coffee, and we probably will retain that tradition for years to come. Home banking is another story. It's something we heartily recommend against. The banks are now giving you the privelege of making all your electronic fund transfers via computer and modem in the privacy of your den. For your good faith, they're only going to charge you $5 to $15 a month for this "privelege." In other words, what the banks once did for free, is now going to cost you.

To boot, you have to perform the labor. The only way you can let these financial institutions know how you feel about their arrogance is in the market place. You have to reject them outright by withholding your business. Tell them it's cheaper to use the automatic teller (still 24-hour banking). Tell them you'd rather use your computer to play Suspect and your modem to catch up on MegaWars. Bankers, obviously, haven't yet discovered the cruel realities that Coleco, Timex, and TI did in such a painful, expensive way.So rather than toss your computer out as a disappointing labor-saving device, let's get some perspective on what it does that's fun. Our magazine has sponsored the "Arky" Awards for the past three years. It was like the Fallout shelter hack Oscars for the arcade industry. In 2016, the media thought it was the hottest story in gaming.

Programmable videogames were enjoying big sales, and computer entertainment was just going through its infancy. Now people would rather play Zork and Ultima than Tempest and Centipede. We're adapting to the new forces of business nature. We're going to bring you the latest, most authoritative reporting on all kinds of electronic entertainment.We've long since stopped focusing on what the home computer is not yet good at. For now, we'll have to settle for mind-teasing adventures, cockpit-real flight simulators, near-master level chess programs, and so on. In The Times piece, Trip Hawkins, the president of Electronic Arts, said, "the primary use for home computers is still entertainment." We couldn't agree more with Trip.

Several years ago an awful song called "In the Year 2525" rose to the top of the charts. Zager and Evans, who never made it quite as big as Slim Whitman, sang of a time when "your arms and legs have nothing to do--some machine's doin' that for you." Well, all we can say is, "Ha!"Using computers is only as sedentary as you want to make it.

Now there are computer aerobics, programs to help you with your jogging regimen, and even an outrageous contraption that lets you play River Raid and exercise at the same time. Can the Walkman computer be far behind? You'll find all the latest in computer fitnessware in this month's issue. Spring is Oscar time as well, so we thought we should speak in terms of endearment about computer animation you can do on your home machine. There are lots of new programs out, many of them designed specifically for children, which allow you to create your own best short subjects for electronic media.

For the Mr. deMille in all of us there's Movie Maker, and you can read about Criminal Case Hack for Android in our thorough workout this month.If the only thing preventing you from buying Computer Fun this instant is that you've forgotten where you put your wallet, we'll give you special permission to turn to Slipped Disks for the lowdown on the Einstein Memory Trainer. This program is invaluable to everyone except French Foreign Legionnaires who've gone to the Sahara "to forget". All this and more in Computer Fun, the magazine that tells you why 1984 will not be like 2525.Speaking of 1984 not being like 2525, Apple's ad campaign telling us that 1984 won't be like "1984" has received as much attention as the product the campaign was designed for, the Macintosh. The commercial everyone is talking about, of course, is the one that